If we saw tomorrow's newspaper today, tomorrow would never happen.

The concept of need is often looked upon rather unfavorably by economists, in contrast with the concept of demand. Both, however, have their own strengths and weaknesses. The need concept is criticized as being too mechanical, as denying the autonomy and individuality of the human person, and as implying that the human being is a machine which "needs" fuel in the shape of food, engine dope in the shape of medicine, and spare parts provided by the surgeon.

Any attempt to reduce the complex properties of biological organisms or of nervous systems or of human brains to simple physical and chemical systems is foolish.

Physicists only talk to physicists, economists to economists-worse still, nuclear physicists only talk to nuclear physicists and econometricians to econometricians. One wonders sometimes if science will not grind to a stop in an assemblage of walled-in hermits, each mumbling to himself words in a private language that only he can understand.

... the fouling of the nest which has been typical of man's activity in the past on a local scale now seems to be extending to the whole world society.

At the opposite pole from the gift is tribute - that is, a grant made out of fear and under threat. A threat is a statement of the form "you do something that I want or I will do something that you do not want.

Economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.